dancing garbage man

Dancing garbage man brings joy to the streets of Brampton

Cold, dark and usually pretty boring, January can be a tough month for Canadians to smile through — and that's in the best of times.

This year has been even gloomier than most amid a global pandemic and provincewide stay-at-home lockdown orders, making every kind gesture, however small, all the more impactful.

A young sanitation worker in Peel Region proved this to perfection on Wednesday morning while doing his job and simultaneously entertaining local residents.

Brampton entrepreneur Tysa Fagan spotted the garbage collector dancing while emptying green bins into a truck on Wednesday morning at 9:30 a.m.

"I decided to record him because he just seems so happy," she told blogTO. "It brought joy to my day. Hopefully he could get a raise. He deserves it!"

In the video she uploaded to Instagram yesterday, Fagan can be heard laughing with joy in her car as the worker demonstrates his impressive talents.

She eventually rolls down the window and tells him to have a good day, later captioning the clip with "happiest garbage man I've ever seen" and the hashtags #getit #dancer #garbageday and #yougottaloveyourjob.

The collector really does seem to love his job, or at the very least love whatever music he was listening to while doing it, and his energy proved infectious. 

Fagan says she'd never seen the dancing waste collector before, but he did certainly brighten her morning — as well as the mornings of everyone else who saw him on the street and in her video.

"He literally just made my whole day," the 34-year-old entrepreneur wrote in response to a comment from someone else who loved the garbage man's moves. "Now I feel like I have to make someone laugh the way he made me laugh."

"I've seen him too," wrote another commenter. "Just perfect during this time."

The man's identity is, at this point, unknown to the public, but we do know that trash collection in Brampton is handled by the Region of Peel.

Perhaps someone from the City will see Fagan's clip and recognize the dancing waste collector for going above and beyond to make people smile in these atypically dreary times.

Lead photo by

Tysa Fagan


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